all about audience research in museums and other cultural institutions

Friday, September 05, 2008

Models of Museum Visiting

This question from Ido Beja, Haifa University (via Facebook!): My name is Ido, I'm a student from Haifa University, and I'm doing some research about visitors in museums with hope to build a system for groups of visitors in museums based on group modeling. I saw the abstract of your article "Developing a model of museum visiting" - can you please sent me hard copy of the article?

Hi Ido, I did indeed write a paper on this topic in 2001, presenting it at a Museums Australia conference in Canberra. Basically the study involved a series of exit surveys conducted from November 1999 to January 2001 with visitors to the Australian Museum, Sydney. Questions were designed to see what factors identified from the literature influenced reasons given for visiting museums and galleries generally, and the Australian Museum in particular. 413 visitors were asked to rate eleven indicators on a 5-point Likert-scale, with 1 being low and 5 high. From both looking at the data and a literature review I developed a model of museum visiting which included the following five highest rating factors (in order):

experiencing something new

entertainment

learning

the interests of children/family

doing something worthwhile in leisure

There was not much discrimination between factors based on the relatively small variation between standard deviations (from 1.04 to 1.51), which suggested to me that these are probably the main drivers for visitors to museums.

The model I proposed is below. This is further explained in the paper you asked about, which I have posted on my Audience Research wiki (go down the page to find it).

I haven't re-looked at this for awhile now so be interested in any feedback.

3 comments:

Ido replied with this comment: My problem is that the material is about museums in Australian only and I'm searching for something more general.

Ido, if you look at the bibliography in the paper there are general references there. The major two are the Hood 1995 and Falk 1998 papers which are quite general, although based on data. In Chapter One of my thesis, which can be found here, there is a section on why peple visit and a pretty comprehensive bibliography of studies done in UK, US and Europe.

Hi all. At the risk of being very self-serving, I could point to the article “The ‘Museum Constant’: One-third plus or minus a bit”, Visitor Studies Today, 8(2), 2005, 1 – 7. It brings a tiny bit of internationalism to the issue of reasons for visiting.

What is the audience research blog?

Hi everyone. I'm conducting a blogging experiment - will this blog become a way for those of us who work in museum evaluation and audience research to share our work with the world, rather than via email to our contacts as happens currently?

My challenge to you, my colleagues, is to use this blog to post questions, answer queries and share experiences. I look forward to this adventure with a mixed sense of excitement and anxiety!

Disclaimer: The views expressed on this blog are those of individual post authors and are not the official views of the Australian Museum, who accepts no liability for content posted on this site. This blog is moderated by Lynda Kelly with input from Mel Broe an intern from the University of Sydney.